A network services exchange provider or co-location provider (a “provider”) may employ a communication facility, such as a data center, in which multiple customers of the provider locate network, server, and storage gear and interconnect to a variety of telecommunications and other network service provider(s) with a minimum of cost and complexity. Such customers are said to be “co-located” in the communication facility. A communication facility may be shared by the multiple tenants locating networking equipment within the communication facility. With IT and communications facilities in safe, secure hands, telecommunications, Internet, application service providers, cloud service providers, content providers, and other providers, as well as enterprises, enjoy less latency and the freedom to focus on their core business. Additionally, customers may reduce their traffic back-haul costs and free up their internal networks for other uses.
In some cases, the communication facility includes an interconnection system that provides interconnection services by which customers of the provider may interconnect to one another over the interconnection system infrastructure or by which a customer of the provider may interconnect its spatially and/or geographically distributed customer networking equipment over the communication facility infrastructure. The communication facility may in such cases be referred to as an “interconnection facility” or “co-location and interconnection facility.” An interconnection facility provider may provide services accessible to co-located customers via an interconnection, such services including, for example, a cloud exchange, Internet access, an Internet exchange, “metro connect” for reaching other communication facilities within a metropolitan area, a cross-connect from one customer to another, and other interconnection services. Interconnections may represent connections between customer networks for inter-customer interconnections (between different customers) or intra-customer interconnections (between areas of an interconnection center(s) that are operated/leased by a single customer).
Cloud computing refers to the use of dynamically scalable computing resources accessible via a network, such as the Internet. The computing resources, often referred to as a “cloud,” provide one or more services to users. These services may be categorized according to service types, which may include for examples, applications/software, platforms, infrastructure, virtualization, and servers and data storage. The names of service types are often prepended to the phrase “as-a-Service” such that the delivery of applications/software and infrastructure, as examples, may be referred to as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Virtualization-as-a-Service (VaaS), and data storage-as-a-service (dSaaS).
The term “cloud-based services” or, more simply, “cloud services” refers not only to services provided by a cloud, but also to a form of service provisioning in which cloud customers contract with cloud service providers for the online delivery of services provided by the cloud. Cloud service providers manage a public, private, or hybrid cloud to facilitate the online delivery of cloud services to one or more cloud customers. An interconnection facility may interconnect cloud customers and cloud service providers using a cloud exchange, for example.